Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

The House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the government's unconstitutional spying provided the Obama Administration with a marvelous opportunity to answer Congress’s questions about abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, the laws being used by the government to order phone companies provide the calling information from every American's calling information. Representatives from both parties grilled the government’s witnesses about the spying, the lack of transparency, the violation of the law, and the violation of the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, the witnesses were caught off guard, unable to answer questions, and hid behind secrecy.

Skype has long claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted", an architectural category that suggests conversations over the service would be difficult or impossible to eavesdrop upon, even given control of users' Internet connections. But Skype's 2005 independent security review admits a caveat to this protection: "defeat of the security mechanisms at the Skype Central Server" could facilitate a "man-in-the-middle attack" (see section 3.4.1). Essentially, the Skype service plays the role of a certificate authority for its users and, like other certificate authorities, could facilitate eavesdropping by giving out the wrong keys.

In the past two weeks Congress has introduced a slew of bills responding to the Guardian's publication of a top secret court order using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to demand that Verizon Business Network Services give the National Security Agency (NSA)a record of every customer's call historyfor three months. The order was confirmed by officials like President Obama and Senator Feinstein, who said it was a "routine" 90 day reauthorization of a program started in 2007.

"Restore the Fourth" isn't officially affiliated with any formal organizations, but given our shared goal of ending illegal spying on Americans, EFF had the opportunity to speak to the crowd. Below, you'll find a short video of some highlights from that speech, and the full text as prepared.

Each year, EFF’s Who Has Your Back campaign assesses the policies and practices of major Internet companies as a way to encourage and incentivize those companies to take a stand for their users in the face of government demands for data.